Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.
Listen, I’m 33 years old, which means that when I watch my teen sister use YouTube, I feel like Jane fucking Goodall.
The apparatus appeared when I was in high school and she not even a twinkle in my stepdad’s eye. While we both now go on YouTube, I simply adopted it; she, Bane-like, was born in it, using it exponentially more frequently and utterly differently than I do. The influencers, recaps, gameplays, unboxing videos, and tutorials that she watches are, for her, like after-school television was for me when I was roughly her age, but while being distinct from “adult” culture (which makes sense, given that a discrete children’s culture is more easily commodified). I use these things on occasion when I need to. She’s been marinading in them her entire life.
Though we’ve had the requisite conversations about online safety, I try to stay aware of her YouTube activities (I worry a lot about her getting red-pilled or catfished), which is hard to do because what I’ve seen is, for my tastes, excruciatingly tedious. Minecraft experts with names like Dream. Something called Five Nights At Freddy’s, which for years I thought was an unlistenable music group, but which turns out to be a “survival horror video game.” Hypnotically-breasted anime characters. White guy comedians who are not even comically unfunny but who, I have to admit, I would probably have found cool and hilarious were I her age. I never feel the distance of the almost-twenty years between us as much as I do than when she briefly welcomes me into her online media habits.
Because if you sat me down in front of YouTube and ask me to share something with you—something fun and funny and entertaining—this is probably where I’d go first.
While preparing to wrap up this series about the art of the interview, it occurred to me that some of my favorite interviews are ones in which the subjects upend what can feel like a disciplinary or even humiliating ritual, particularly if those subjects aren’t straight white men. Not that straight white men aren’t capable of this as well—I don’t care one way or another about actor Jonah Hill, but his refusal to allow interviewers to talk about his body as if it were disgusting is cool—but they’re not what tends to capture my attention.
Divas on divas, made by ex-Gawkerite Rich Juzwiak all the way back in 2011, is not just the upending, or even co-opting, of the interview by divas in conversation with other divas—it’s also pure gay adrenaline. Interlinking clips of pop stars and singers like Lady Gaga and Mary J. Blige talking about other pop stars, Juzwiak makes you feel like a speedball at the mercy of an alpha warming up for the big match. From Janet Jackson activating my fight-or-flight response by demurely implying that Madonna is classless, to Mariah Carey simply saying, No., at the mention of Christina Aguilera, this ten-minute clip is a daisy-chain of feminine terror, not a one of them failing to rouse the panicky bliss of seeing a straight woman and knowing, in your bones, that gay people are obsessed with her.
Between the slams, real generosity offsets, and even enriches, the cuntiness: Whitney Houston describes Mariah Carey to Wendy Williams as “a little lamb chop.” Celine Dion calls Mariah “fabulous, with a lot of class.” Britney Spears, infamous for her sweetness, doesn’t have an unkind word to say about anybody, even Madonna, who everyone else obviously hates. My favorite clip is one where Whitney, leaning back in an almost-caricature of seriousness, her upper lip just a little too firm, allows that Madonna, “works hard at what she does.” Fatality!
True to form, Juzwiak has collated camp for us, poking fun at these women’s expense while simultaneously taking an authentic pleasure in their sense of humor and ferocious nerve. While not the sole domain of women, is the campy interview—an upending by interviewer, subject, and audience, sometimes all at once—not predominated by them? Before Zach Galifianakis did Between Two Ferns, there was the iconic (and unironic) Nebraskan broadcaster Leta Powell Drake, who died this past September; Tom Cruise may have made that couch a legend, but that furniture first belonged to Oprah, who gave him the stage and both hands to hold.
To rephrase a question I asked in Part 1 of this series, how does a good interview hold its audience’s interest over time? Juzwiak made this superclip over a decade ago, and it comprises celebrity culture going back before I was born, and yet it still maintains its hold on me, thanks in no small part to the power of the internet.
But this doesn’t mean that its appeal remains static. It changes as I change, its pleasures shifting with time (I only love Whitney more. I only love Madonna less). When I remember with Divas on Divas, I’m remembering with myself, too.
David tweets at @k8bushofficial. Preorder their second novel, X (Catapult, 2022).
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that supercut was the thing i didn’t know i needed this bummer-ass morning 💕💕💕